problem child

i'm meant to be writing other things right now - anything except this i think.
i've been listening to boy george and the culture club's 'colour by numbers' every night this week to help me get to sleep. the problem is that it's on cassette and when it gets to the end of side one i have to get out of cosy bed to eject and turn it round. which means it's not helping me get to sleep, right?
'colour by numbers' is my earliest musical memory. listening to it now it's like 'hmm that's a bit simply red, it's a bit ub40' but it's so much more than that. there was that whole early 80s pre-SAW sound that took pop music very very seriously. the kind of groups who played instruments and made proper albums. boy george's CC was part of that movement.
i don't want to ignore my pop heritage.
not that anybody cares about my particular pop heritage, but we each have our own, i'd like to think. top of the pops on a thursday night. fisher price tape recorder. a dressing up box.
i remember clutching the tape box in my probably sticky little hand and bringing it to the counter in woolworths. i think it cost £3.99.
then there was the fancy dress party - the floppy straw hat with woolen plaits stiched on, the baggy black shirtcoat, the make-up. i was a girl who wanted to be a boy who wanted to be a girl. i loved it.
i went to the hanover grand for annette's birthday. why can't i remeber how old we were? teenage. boy george was djing there and i thought 'shall i? shan't i?'

until madonna came along there was really only one queen of pop for me.